Adequate pain management in veterinary medicine is both an ethical obligation and an area where practice frequently falls short of available evidence.
Veterinary pain management ethics rests on the recognition that pain is a welfare-relevant subjective experience in non-human patients requiring the same professional obligation to treat as in human medicine. The historical tendency toward underestimation and underprescription of analgesia in veterinary settings reflects several factors: difficulty of pain assessment in non-verbal patients, concerns about opioid regulation and client compliance, and uncertainty about the degree of pain experienced by various species. Evidence-based pain management tools — validated pain scales for multiple species, multimodal analgesia protocols, and species-specific pharmacological options — have addressed the knowledge barrier. What remains is consistent implementation, particularly for post-operative and chronic pain management in companion animals, where adequate home analgesia is frequently underprescribed or inadequately explained to owners.